After all, he was still acting very strangely. They got to the truck, and he didn’t just help her in. He opened thedoor for her first. Awkwardly, like he knew he was doing something weird, but couldn’t seem to stop himself. And he didn’t put on the shipping news when he got in. He reached for the on button on the radio, then stopped short. Then reached for it, then stopped short.
But the weirdest thing was definitely the restaurant.
The one he pulled up outside without saying anything to her or negotiating a single thing. Even though it wasn’t his kind of place at all. It was the seafood joint she’d bookmarked after their rules conversation. BIGPOPPA’S, the neon sign above the broad windows screamed.
And the rest of it was just as garish.
It had a giant plastic lobster above the door.
He should have been arguing with her about setting so much as a toe in a place like this, and yet he had chosen it. As if he were in the middle of some sort of mental break. First he was furious, and now he was whatever this was, and neither of those two states seemed conducive to a discussion about the shit they were in. It seemed better to just work on it alone, nice and quiet, so he never had to know.
And then they got inside the restaurant, and oh god.
People made actual sounds. And true, a lot of them seemed to be attendees of his interview. One of a group of girls seemed to be actually cosplaying as one of his characters. But many of them weren’t, and they were still staring. Then sort of pointing. Oh, and there was definitely a man in the corner of the restaurant surreptitiously filming them with his phone.
Things needed to be said.
Broken to him, before he noticed on his own.
Because he would, eventually. The phone guy had stood now, so he could see into the corner she had forced the waitress to take them to. She had to put up a menu as a kind of shield around them, before she spoke.
“Okay, we need to talk about everything that is going on right now,” she whispered, from behind brightly colored images of dancing crabs and talking fries. But he didn’t join her. He just carried on arranging his napkin on his lap and putting on his glasses to peruse his own menu.
Then he saidthis:
“Nothing is going on right now. I’m being perfectly normal.”
As if the issue were his manner. Which it kind of was—he still seemed way too calm and silent for her liking. But they had bigger fish to fry. “You are acting the least normal I can ever imagine you being, but that’s not the point.”
“Then what is, exactly?”
“What happened on that stage.”
“We had an argument about how cruel I can be.”
I never said cruel, she thought. But he didn’t seem bothered by the label he was leveling at himself. His face was as neutral as she’d ever seen it. She couldn’t even really see his eyes behind those little weird glasses to discern if there was light in them. So she plowed on.
“Right. And after that. After that what happened.”
“I did what I was supposed to do, what you asked me to do. I said a lot of things I don’t really believe, about how simple love is, how it’s just there waiting for everyone, that everyone deserves it, that everyone knowshow to show and give it, that it’s easy and forever,” he said, voice getting fainter and fainter as he did. Like the words were poison to him, even as an echo of the originals. But then he seemed to straighten. He cleared his throat. He took off those glasses, and set them upside down on the table as he finished his thought. “And they ate it up. Job done.”
It made her sit forward. Talk like a teacher spelling things out.
“Yeah, butwhydid they eat it up. Why did they. What love did they think you were talking about. Let’s connect some dots here. Let’s put on our thinking caps and switch on our memories and recall who they kept mentioning.”
“The only person they mentioned was you.”
“Yep, and what did they say about me?”
He looked genuinely puzzled. Shrugged one shoulder. “Nothing. They wanted to know where you got your sweater,” he said. Then he wagged a finger at it, as if it had done something wrong. Much to her exasperation.
“Dude, they asked that because their favorite of your heroes gives the heroine one just like this. With the off-the-shoulder part, and the stripes. He makes it for her, and leaves it in their childhood treehouse.”
“So you really have read my books.”
She threw up her hands. “That’swhat you’re going to grasp here?”
“I don’t know what else you could want. Everything went great—and without any need for any elaborate nonsense. No actress had to pretend to be my special someone for any of this to perfectly work.”
